Photoshop maker Adobe, Inc. today announced in a blog post general availability of its Aperture competitor Lightroom. A free beta of Photoshop Lightroom 4 was posted two months ago and today the software is available for education customers on both Mac OS X and Windows platforms. The company’s Vice President of Products and Creative Media Solutions Winston Hendrickson billed Lightroom 4 “a stunning new release that will enhance photography workflows and help photographs stand out from the crowd.”

Amongst the new features, Adobe touts the new shadow and highlight recovery capabilities, the ability to soft-proof images, improved auto adjustments to dynamically set values for exposure and contrast, and added local adjustment controls, such as noise reduction, moire, and white balance. The new Books and Map modules let you order photo books and display geotagged images on a world map with reverse geo-tagging controls, respectively. You also get new video controls to play, trim, and extract frames from video clips and export in H.264 to Facebook and Flickr.

More information about Lightroom 4 is available at the Adobe website. You can order the application for $149.99 as a standalone download or pay $79 for an upgrade. Alternatively, customers who purchased Photoshop CS5, Photoshop CS5 Extended, or any Creative Suite 5.5 edition can get Lightroom 4 for $99.

Photoshop maker Adobe Systems, Inc., released a long-expected iPad companion aptly named “Photoshop Touch.” The Android version demonstrated at Maxx earlier this year and released shortly afterwards.

The first in a series of six touch-optimized apps (the other five are Collage, Debut, Ideas, Kuler and Proto), it supports Photoshop layers—arguably the basic and most-oft used Photoshop feature. With simple finger gestures, users can combine multiple photos into layered images, make popular edits, and apply professional effects. It also provides advanced selection tools and adjustments.

According to Adobe’s website, the tablet-exclusive Scribble Selection Tool lets you extract objects in an image by simply scribbling on what to keep and then what to remove. With Refine Edge technology from Adobe Photoshop, even hard-to-select areas with soft edges, such as hair, are easily captured when making selections. Photoshop Touch also plays nice with Creative Cloud—a brand new paid cloud storage service from Adobe for seamless sync of your Photoshop files between desktop and iPad.

Social sharing is also supported through Facebook or email. You can also import images from Facebook, Google Image Search, and your iPad’s camera roll. Photoshop Touch works only on iPad 2 and requires iOS 5. The app is a $9.99 download from the App Store. Photoshop Touch became available on Android devices last November.

Software-maker Adobe posted an interesting video on its Photoshop channel through YouTube. The clip showcases content-aware move, which is one of the new features in the upcoming Photoshop CS6 update. Similar to content-aware fill in Photoshop CS5 that replaces the missing pixels behind removed image elements, the new feature lets you define a region and move it around with the background replacing automatically. What’s best is that one only needs to draw a rough boundary around the wanted object and the software will figure out the rest to —in most cases— define a pixel-perfect selection. Moreover, ite lets you stretch and extend objects intelligently without suffering any of the nasty artifacts. More sneak peek videos are after the break. Oh, and 9to5Toys offers some sales promotions on Adobe products.

Adobe just revealed (viaThe Verge) pricing information and more details on its new cloud-based offering called Creative Cloud.

Announced last October along new touch apps for tablets, Creative Cloud is billed as a service that “radically redefines the content creation process” by offering a central web-based repository to store, share and view content across devices. Prices start at $49.99 a month, which buys you a one-year access to 20GB of cloud storage shared across the upcoming Creative Suite 6 apps. This translates into an annual fee of $600 versus the $2,000 (or much less) for the CS license, which could lure those who consider CS too pricey (assuming you only use a license for a year or two).

A membership also gets you all the Creative Suite tools, Adobe Touch Apps and services, device syncing capabilities, in addition to new features, products, and services as soon as they are released. It also includes Lightroom 4 (once it exits beta) and the new Muse and Edge web authoring tools. Volume licensing for businesses will be available this fall for $69.99 a month per seat.

Adobe makes a compelling suite of creative applications, which are the de facto industry standard, but Adobe’s high price points have traditionally put off many prospective Creative Suite buyers. To make matters worse, a change in upgrade policy last year enraged customers as it pushed them towards pricier subscription-based offerings. Well, if you already own Adobe Creative Suite 3 or CS4, you are in for a surprise as the company just announced a special upgrade offer towards CS6 purchases. According to a blog post, special introductory upgrade pricing on Creative Suite 6 to customers who own CS3 or CS4 is available from the time CS6 is released until December 31, 2012. Details will be announced here when CS6 and Creative Cloud are released later this year.

Adobe Systems Incorporated, the maker of the popular photo-editing application Photoshop, announced today that a free beta version of Photoshop Lightroom 4 is now available for download. The software highlights several new features and enhancements over the previous version, most notably support for video and geotags. The latter allows you to pinpoint the exact geographical location of your photographs on a Google map. Geotags are automatically imported from photograph Meta data, but they can be applied manually as well.

Other features include minor drawing tool tweaks, the ability to recover blown-out highlights and shadow detail, support for built-in Blurb book publishing, soft proofing and more. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 Beta can be downloaded free of charge at labs.adobe.com (it expires on March 31, 2012). The company will announce availability and price points of the final version in due time. The full list of new features and a video demonstration are right after the break (release notes here).

Photoshop Elements 10 (App store) and Premiere Elements 10(App Store) became available overnight with the same functionality improvements that the box versions produced, including:

New Facebook features allow you to auto analyze your images to identify people and tag them based on your Facebook friends. Those tags are then carried over to Facebook when uploading from Elements. A new object-based search is one of the most impressive enhancements, allowing you to find images containing a particular object such as a house or vehicle.

Other features include auto enhance and color correct for video footage, allowing you to “Automatically boost tone and vibrance without affecting skin tones, or use sliders to adjust color with complete control”. You can now also paint 1 of 100 new paint effects onto specific photo areas, add new text effects, and immediately upload video clips to Facebook and Youtube. Learn more about all the new features in these latest releases here.

For those who don’t need all of the bells and whistles (and overhead) of Adobe’s Photoshop for photo editing, another product has taken off in the Mac platform. Pixelmator is a $30 Mac App, now in the App Store which gives you 80+% of what Photoshop offers.

The good news is that Pixelmator 2.0 drops tomorrow with additional tools which may be able to take care of the needs of light Illustrator uses as well with the inclusion of Vector Drawing tools:

Enjoy perfectly precise, full-featured drawing tools that allow you to easily create and edit any vector shapes, whether simple or advanced…and some more sophisticated Photoshop tools like content aware fill and a more advanced type tool.

Adobe today quietly released Photoshop Elements 10 and Premiere Elements 10, bringing with them new Facebook and YouTube integration, video editing and burring features, object-based search, and new color correcting and text curving and flowing effects.

New Facebook features allow you to auto analyze your images to identify people and tag them based on your Facebook friends. Those tags are then carried over to Facebook when uploading from Elements. A new object-based search is one of the most impressive enhancements, allowing you to find images containing a particular object such as a house or vehicle.

Other features include auto enhance and color correct for video footage, allowing you to “Automatically boost tone and vibrance without affecting skin tones, or use sliders to adjust color with complete control”. You can now also paint 1 of 100 new paint effects onto specific photo areas, add new text effects, and immediately upload video clips to Facebook and Youtube. Learn more about all the new features in these latest releases here.

Mac App Store version of the application costs $80 and includes all the same editing tools as the full version. However, unlike the full $100 version, it does not come bundled with the Adobe Elements Organizer application. This version is available only in English, and cannot be purchased anywhere outside of Apple’s Mac App Store.

The big deal here is that a huge software maker, that makes a lot of money on selling boxed software, is trying out the App Store. Adobe are also experimenting in the iOS App Store as well. The big question: Will Creative Suite be there soon with Apple taking 30% of the cut? Ouch.

For all of you Adobe Flash and Air fans out there, Adobe has released the next major version of the authoring tool out onto the Internet. New features of Flash include, Stage3D APIs, 64-bit support, G.711 audio compression for telephony, H.264/AVC SW Encoding, Socket Progress Events and HD surround sound.